Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/twice-exceptional-students/5023326/
Besides being famous, what characteristics do all these people have in common?
- Stephen Hawking
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Albert Einstein
- James Earl Jones
- Sarah Barnhart
- Winston Churchill
- Walt Disney
- Helen Keller
- Temple Grandin
- Thomas Edison
- Ludwig van Beethoven
All these individuals are twice exceptional: a person with one or more special needs who is also gifted and talented (Hunt & Marshall, 2012). Twice-exceptional people have unique needs; young twice-exceptional students — age birth to age eight-years-old — pose unique challenges for early childhood programs.
Challenges of Young, Twice-exceptional Students
As early childhood programs engage in early identification of children with special needs, and as programs find various ways to meet the needs of children with developmental delays, twice-exceptional children pose additional challenges. One challenge is that a student’s disability may be identified — or at least recognized — but their giftedness is not. According to Clark (2013), teachers often have stereotypical views of both children with disabilities and those who are gifted. Because of this bias, they may not understand that children with disabilities can be gifted, and that some gifted children require special education services to succeed. This is partly because giftedness is difficult to identify in young children (Sweeney, 2007), and a child with obvious gifts in one or more areas can mask his ...